6 ms·

LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]

392 points by zahrevsky 10mo ago

Rygian 10mo ago
Feature request: even/odd page stains that line up exactly as a single thru-stain.
- aDyslecticCrow 10mo ago
  slightly fading for each page.
  - blitzar 10mo ago
    Page reordering for the inevitable large scale spill and hurried cleanup.
kasane_teto 10mo ago
How nice.
aaronblohowiak 10mo ago
Interesting way to apply a water mark
- alansaber 10mo ago
  Coffee mark*
Zigurd 10mo ago
Brilliant! And people say Lucent overpaid for their logo.
spudlyo 10mo ago
I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it. Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.
- fourthark 10mo ago
  Thankfully there is a Typst port of this package! https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/ https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/
  - philistine 10mo ago
    That package still has the core limitation of Typst: images can only be placed top-middle-bottom and left-centre-right. Typst still has yet to support arbitrarily placed images.
    - doerig 10mo ago
      You mean absolutely positioning it? You can do that with the place function and displacing it with dx/dy from the origin (https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place). Example: #place(top + left, dy: 2cm, dx: 4cm, image("image.png"))
      - philistine 10mo ago
        That seems usable for manual layout, but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. I reuse my LaTeX code to make volumes of books, and I never touch the code. It's fire and forget for me, which this does not seem to solve.
        tcfhgj 10mo ago
        > but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. they end up exactly at the specified location?
        antonvs 10mo ago
        Presumably they're referring to the ability to parameterize the target page size. In that case, absolute coordinates don't work well (if at all).
zippyman55 10mo ago
This looks like the old Lucent Technologies corporate logo. This would have been handy back in the day.
- SanjayMehta 10mo ago
  Dogbert's "Brown ring of quality." Good times.
ravila4 10mo ago
This looks nice, but it is just placing some pre-defined vector files. I wonder if it could be possible to procedurally generate realistic coffee stains.
- ted_dunning 10mo ago
  Absolutely! Go for it!
kubb 10mo ago
Not drinking coffee is the only reason I’ve ever felt truly excluded at a software company. Everyone loves their coffee!
- bombcar 10mo ago
  I'm in the same boat; I can pretend with tea but it's not really the same experience. Diet soda sometimes works, but often isn't provided as easily.
- nitnelave 10mo ago
  You need to go all-in on tea and make your own mark. Get a fancy Chinese teapot with holes in the spout to use loose leaf tea, and start getting snobby about traditional vs modern techniques of Pu'er tea, and you'll get your own brand of respect!
pdpi 10mo ago
Everybody knows that coffee stains are the only surefire way to tell whether a paper has been read or just printed out and ignored. A colleague in uni (way back in early 00s) would add these to her documents every once in a while to give them the "has been read" stamp of approval.
- cossatot 10mo ago
  And wine glass stains are the only way to know your paper has been graded.
  - pwagland 10mo ago
    And tear stains, or the lack thereof, are the only sure sign of quality.
- tengwar2 9mo ago
  Could Garibaldi read Narn?
velcrovan 10mo ago
Reminds me of Windows 3.11 programs that would add random "coffee stains" to your "desktop" "wallpaper"
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
(2021) Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
pureagave 10mo ago
This is wonderful to see. I was a student and then entered into the tech industry in the mid 90's and at that time the Internet had fun whimsical things like this almost weekly.
- mcswell 10mo ago
  Obviously this was whimsical when it came out. However...we were creating synthetic data for training and testing OCR in multiple scripts. We would take a web page in some language with a non-Roman script, and reproduce it as multiple PDFs using different fonts. We also added various kinds of blurring, using ImageMagick and---of course---this very coffee stains program!
bmenrigh 10mo ago
I'm happy this is public domain. In 2023 I used the stain images as the basis for a CTF challenge (for BSidesSF). The encoded flag given to participants was https://github.com/BSidesSF/ctf-2023-release/blob/main/alien/distfiles/flag.png https://github.com/BSidesSF/ctf-2023-release/blob/main/alien... Unfortunately the challenge was a bit too hard and went unsolved during the competition.
- hughw 10mo ago
  It's hard to imagine a reason for it being kept... proprietary?
  - bmenrigh 10mo ago
    A lot of people want to slap licenses on things without really thinking about what the license will do (or prevent), in practice. I like the author's note about the license: "As we do not believe in imaginary property, this package belongs to the public domain." I think it's much more common to see a Creative Commons license on this sort of thing.
    - viraptor 10mo ago
      And even then, when people have good intentions they don't anyways know about edge cases. Please give things a licence in addition to placing it in public domain, because in some countries (like Australia) you can't release your rights that way.
Drunk_Engineer 10mo ago
Possibly related: https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html
- TwoFx 10mo ago
  Maybe I'm just missing the joke, but it feels worth pointing out that almost all of the logos on that page are clearly inspired by the ensō circle from Zen art.
- amelius 10mo ago
  Putting a circle around your logo is about as silly as putting a horizontal line under your signature.
Seattle3503 10mo ago
I think it would be cool to see a version for epub 3.3, which is mostly html/xhtml with some limitations
tuhgdetzhh 10mo ago
"This page was intentionally left blank" is also an all time favorite of mine.
- hanche 10mo ago
  There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes: IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin. Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 10mo ago
Finally, I can drink my yerba mate and not be dismissed as a researcher.
drob518 10mo ago
My life is complete. I can die happy.
- random_duck 9mo ago
  LaTex is complete it can die happy.
  - random_duck 9mo ago
    (This is a joke, please transfer LaTex's consciousness into a computer so it can live forever = w = )
deckar01 10mo ago
Coffee stains should look like water color paints. The fluid deposits pigment more at dry boundaries as evaporation and absorption approach equilibrium.
arunc 10mo ago
To save our children in the academia, we need a "Rewrite In Typst" movement, the equivalent of rewrite in rust!
- sieste 10mo ago
  If only they had stuck with latex maths syntax instead of inventing their own, I would have switched ages ago and encouraged others to do the same...
  - tcfhgj 10mo ago
    maybe someone will write a package for latex math
    - TRiG_Ireland 10mo ago
      It's called mitex: https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex
      - aragilar 9mo ago
        Does it support amsmath?
        TRiG_Ireland 9mo ago
        I think so, but I'm no expert in typesetting mathematics.
        aragilar 9mo ago
        That's not exactly encouraging... My biggest gripe with typst is the various design choices which make writing maths much harder than LaTeX (and given many of the issues with LaTeX usability come from having to use poorly maintained legacy packages, not having basic functionality in the core of the replacement seems naive at best).
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
conformist 10mo ago
Another essential package is realhats (replace boring \hat with real hats)! https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
lelandfe 10mo ago
Originally from 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101013903/http://legacy.hanno-rein.de/hanno-rein.de/archives/349 https://web.archive.org/web/20201101013903/http://legacy.han... Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hanno-rein.de https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hanno-rein.de and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 This also reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024165
dcuthbertson 10mo ago
Now I want a package to add blood stains on my murder mystery screenplay.
Vicinity9635 10mo ago
Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.
- Nitrolo 9mo ago
  Any particular template you'd recommend? My resume is LaTeX too but I'm not 100% happy with it (about 98% happy and much happier than with anything else however).
  - Vicinity9635 9mo ago
    [dead]
- benttoothpaste 9mo ago
  Totally agree! I'm adding the coffee stains to my resume as we speak.
anishgupta 10mo ago
Here we go, trying to feel authenticity in our new world. Mistakes are beautiful
jpfromlondon 9mo ago
as amazing as these are, they do still look a little fecal.
notorandit 9mo ago
Half done job or just a starting point! We need also: * tea strains * bread crumbles (squashed among paper leaves) * tomato sauce drops * hair > A lot of time can be saved by printing [extra stuff] directly on the page rather than adding them manually!
- Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
  And a squashed fly every thousand pages or so
  - dredmorbius 9mo ago
    Paw prints! <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cats-medieval-manuscripts-walters-art-museum-2732418 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cats-medieval-manuscripts-...>
jprezant 9mo ago
This is a good read for similar "fun" packages: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67656/are-there-other-fun-packages-like-the-coffee-stains-package https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67656/are-there-othe....
TeamDman 9mo ago
See also: using Mathematica for drawing the circles like in the movie Arrival https://youtu.be/r8nTifCIr0c https://youtu.be/r8nTifCIr0c

392 points by zahrevsky 10mo ago

Rygian 10mo ago

Feature request: even/odd page stains that line up exactly as a single thru-stain.

aDyslecticCrow 10mo ago
slightly fading for each page.
- blitzar 10mo ago
  Page reordering for the inevitable large scale spill and hurried cleanup.

kasane_teto 10mo ago

How nice.

aaronblohowiak 10mo ago

Interesting way to apply a water mark

alansaber 10mo ago
Coffee mark*

Zigurd 10mo ago

Brilliant! And people say Lucent overpaid for their logo.

spudlyo 10mo ago

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it. Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.

fourthark 10mo ago
Thankfully there is a Typst port of this package! https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/ https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/
- philistine 10mo ago
  That package still has the core limitation of Typst: images can only be placed top-middle-bottom and left-centre-right. Typst still has yet to support arbitrarily placed images.
  - doerig 10mo ago
    You mean absolutely positioning it? You can do that with the place function and displacing it with dx/dy from the origin (https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place). Example: #place(top + left, dy: 2cm, dx: 4cm, image("image.png"))
    - philistine 10mo ago
      That seems usable for manual layout, but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. I reuse my LaTeX code to make volumes of books, and I never touch the code. It's fire and forget for me, which this does not seem to solve.
      - tcfhgj 10mo ago
        > but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. they end up exactly at the specified location?
        antonvs 10mo ago
        Presumably they're referring to the ability to parameterize the target page size. In that case, absolute coordinates don't work well (if at all).

zippyman55 10mo ago

This looks like the old Lucent Technologies corporate logo. This would have been handy back in the day.

SanjayMehta 10mo ago
Dogbert's "Brown ring of quality." Good times.

ravila4 10mo ago

This looks nice, but it is just placing some pre-defined vector files. I wonder if it could be possible to procedurally generate realistic coffee stains.

ted_dunning 10mo ago
Absolutely! Go for it!

kubb 10mo ago

Not drinking coffee is the only reason I’ve ever felt truly excluded at a software company. Everyone loves their coffee!

bombcar 10mo ago
I'm in the same boat; I can pretend with tea but it's not really the same experience. Diet soda sometimes works, but often isn't provided as easily.
nitnelave 10mo ago
You need to go all-in on tea and make your own mark. Get a fancy Chinese teapot with holes in the spout to use loose leaf tea, and start getting snobby about traditional vs modern techniques of Pu'er tea, and you'll get your own brand of respect!

pdpi 10mo ago

Everybody knows that coffee stains are the only surefire way to tell whether a paper has been read or just printed out and ignored. A colleague in uni (way back in early 00s) would add these to her documents every once in a while to give them the "has been read" stamp of approval.

cossatot 10mo ago
And wine glass stains are the only way to know your paper has been graded.
- pwagland 10mo ago
  And tear stains, or the lack thereof, are the only sure sign of quality.
tengwar2 9mo ago
Could Garibaldi read Narn?

velcrovan 10mo ago

Reminds me of Windows 3.11 programs that would add random "coffee stains" to your "desktop" "wallpaper"

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

(2021) Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

pureagave 10mo ago

This is wonderful to see. I was a student and then entered into the tech industry in the mid 90's and at that time the Internet had fun whimsical things like this almost weekly.

mcswell 10mo ago
Obviously this was whimsical when it came out. However...we were creating synthetic data for training and testing OCR in multiple scripts. We would take a web page in some language with a non-Roman script, and reproduce it as multiple PDFs using different fonts. We also added various kinds of blurring, using ImageMagick and---of course---this very coffee stains program!

bmenrigh 10mo ago

I'm happy this is public domain. In 2023 I used the stain images as the basis for a CTF challenge (for BSidesSF). The encoded flag given to participants was https://github.com/BSidesSF/ctf-2023-release/blob/main/alien/distfiles/flag.png https://github.com/BSidesSF/ctf-2023-release/blob/main/alien... Unfortunately the challenge was a bit too hard and went unsolved during the competition.

hughw 10mo ago
It's hard to imagine a reason for it being kept... proprietary?
- bmenrigh 10mo ago
  A lot of people want to slap licenses on things without really thinking about what the license will do (or prevent), in practice. I like the author's note about the license: "As we do not believe in imaginary property, this package belongs to the public domain." I think it's much more common to see a Creative Commons license on this sort of thing.
  - viraptor 10mo ago
    And even then, when people have good intentions they don't anyways know about edge cases. Please give things a licence in addition to placing it in public domain, because in some countries (like Australia) you can't release your rights that way.

Drunk_Engineer 10mo ago

Possibly related: https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html

TwoFx 10mo ago
Maybe I'm just missing the joke, but it feels worth pointing out that almost all of the logos on that page are clearly inspired by the ensō circle from Zen art.
amelius 10mo ago
Putting a circle around your logo is about as silly as putting a horizontal line under your signature.

Seattle3503 10mo ago

I think it would be cool to see a version for epub 3.3, which is mostly html/xhtml with some limitations

tuhgdetzhh 10mo ago

"This page was intentionally left blank" is also an all time favorite of mine.

hanche 10mo ago
There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes: IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin. Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.

kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 10mo ago

Finally, I can drink my yerba mate and not be dismissed as a researcher.

drob518 10mo ago

My life is complete. I can die happy.

random_duck 9mo ago
LaTex is complete it can die happy.
- random_duck 9mo ago
  (This is a joke, please transfer LaTex's consciousness into a computer so it can live forever = w = )

deckar01 10mo ago

Coffee stains should look like water color paints. The fluid deposits pigment more at dry boundaries as evaporation and absorption approach equilibrium.

arunc 10mo ago

To save our children in the academia, we need a "Rewrite In Typst" movement, the equivalent of rewrite in rust!

sieste 10mo ago
If only they had stuck with latex maths syntax instead of inventing their own, I would have switched ages ago and encouraged others to do the same...
- tcfhgj 10mo ago
  maybe someone will write a package for latex math
  - TRiG_Ireland 10mo ago
    It's called mitex: https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex
    - aragilar 9mo ago
      Does it support amsmath?
      - TRiG_Ireland 9mo ago
        I think so, but I'm no expert in typesetting mathematics.
        aragilar 9mo ago
        That's not exactly encouraging... My biggest gripe with typst is the various design choices which make writing maths much harder than LaTeX (and given many of the issues with LaTeX usability come from having to use poorly maintained legacy packages, not having basic functionality in the core of the replacement seems naive at best).

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

conformist 10mo ago

Another essential package is realhats (replace boring \hat with real hats)! https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats

lelandfe 10mo ago

Originally from 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101013903/http://legacy.hanno-rein.de/hanno-rein.de/archives/349 https://web.archive.org/web/20201101013903/http://legacy.han... Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hanno-rein.de https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hanno-rein.de and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193 This also reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024165

dcuthbertson 10mo ago

Now I want a package to add blood stains on my murder mystery screenplay.

Vicinity9635 10mo ago

Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.

Nitrolo 9mo ago
Any particular template you'd recommend? My resume is LaTeX too but I'm not 100% happy with it (about 98% happy and much happier than with anything else however).
- Vicinity9635 9mo ago
  [dead]
benttoothpaste 9mo ago
Totally agree! I'm adding the coffee stains to my resume as we speak.

anishgupta 10mo ago

Here we go, trying to feel authenticity in our new world. Mistakes are beautiful

jpfromlondon 9mo ago

as amazing as these are, they do still look a little fecal.

notorandit 9mo ago

Half done job or just a starting point! We need also: * tea strains * bread crumbles (squashed among paper leaves) * tomato sauce drops * hair > A lot of time can be saved by printing [extra stuff] directly on the page rather than adding them manually!

Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
And a squashed fly every thousand pages or so
- dredmorbius 9mo ago
  Paw prints! <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cats-medieval-manuscripts-walters-art-museum-2732418 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cats-medieval-manuscripts-...>

jprezant 9mo ago

This is a good read for similar "fun" packages: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67656/are-there-other-fun-packages-like-the-coffee-stains-package https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67656/are-there-othe....

TeamDman 9mo ago

See also: using Mathematica for drawing the circles like in the movie Arrival https://youtu.be/r8nTifCIr0c https://youtu.be/r8nTifCIr0c